1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to a method, system, and computer program product for retaining base data set-specific diagnostic information for troubleshooting in a computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
The majority of businesses in the world today use computers and computer operating systems to store and manage information. The information stored in computer operating systems is typically organized into catalogs. Users may want to pass information from one catalog to another for several reasons. For example, the user might want to assign each division within a company its own catalog. Thus, the company would need to pass information associated with the division that is stored in the company catalog into a corresponding division catalog.
Catalogs are utilized to organize and locate data sets. A catalog in essence is a data set that contains information required to locate other data sets. A data set is often the fundamental unit of data storage and retrieval and typically consists of a collection of data in one of several prescribed arrangements. These arrangements are described by control information to which the computer operating system has access. A data set is a collection of logically related data records stored on a single external storage volume, or a set of volumes. A data set can be, for example, a source program, a library of macros, or a file of data records used by a processing program. A catalog does not have to be on the same volume(s) as the data sets the catalog describes. A catalog can refer to hundreds or thousands of data sets spread across many volumes.
Catalogs are sometimes structured in an integrated catalog facility (ICF). An ICF catalog may include two components. One component contains non-data-specific information, or the logical description, of a data set. The other component contains data-specific information, or the physical description, of a data set. Catalogs allow users to find and access a data set by name without knowing the exact location of the data set in memory storage. By cataloging data sets, users do not need to know about the storage setup.
Currently, when a user receives an error for a specific data set, the user must gather information from numerous sources in an attempt to pinpoint the root cause of the error. For example, the user may have to examine system logs, logrec error logs, joblogs, system management facility (SMF) records, and a variety of additional shared repositories for information related to this specific data set. The process of sorting through potentially numerous amounts of data to find small portions relating to the specific data set may expend resources, such as time and bandwidth.